Blood and Tragedy: The Caucasus in the Literary Imagination

At the beginning of “The Cossacks,” Leo Tolstoy’s early novel about imperial Russia’s military campaign in the Caucasus, the protagonist Olenin muses about the battles to come: “All his dreams about the future were connected with… Circassian maids, mountains, precipices, fearsome torrents and dangers.” He imagines, with predictable vigor, “killing and subduing a countless number of mountaineers.” Much less predictably, he identifies himself with the Central Asian people he is being sent to subjugate: “He was himself one of the mountaineers, helping them to defend their independence against the Russians.”

That subjugation of the Caucasus would continue for another two centuries, culminating in the two successive wars waged by Yeltsin and Putin. From somewhere within that region—it is not clear where, exactly—emerged the Tsarnaev family, immigrating (apparently) to the Boston area about a decade ago. On Monday, the two Tsarnaev brothers—Dzhokhar and Tamerlan—allegedly committed the first act of terror on American soil since 9/11.

Whether the two accused bombers had specific grievances about the plight of their native Chechnya is unclear. But as the details of their lives emerge, people will inevitably be searching for links between the two young men and the conflict-riven place they come from. It’s a conflict that started with the Cossack encroachments of the eighteenth century and continued with imperial invasions under Catherine the Great, mass deportations by Stalin, and the post-Soviet cruelties of the contemporary Kremlin.

And the Caucasus—a region loosely encompassing Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ossetia, and Ingushetia—has always occupied a mystical place in Russian literature. It is a region of rough natural beauty but also a place of exile, where those who ran afoul of the tsar were sent to ponder their fealty to the empire. A place to conquer but also a place before which to stand in awe. If Russia has a cultural subconscious, it lies east of the Don River.

For Russian writers of the nineteenth century, being banished to the Caucasus was usually a sign that one was on the path to glory. Pushkin’s democratic poem “Ode to Liberty” earned him banishment to “the south” for the next three years, where he wrote “A Prisoner in the Caucasus.” Removed from his beloved Petersburg, he nevertheless found inspiration in this foreign land where, as the work’s dedication has it, “warlike raiders roam the hills / and a wild imagination / lies in ambush in the empty silence.”

It may be ironic that writers, like Pushkin, who badly wanted Mother Russia to catch up to her Western European neighbors could at the same time celebrate the unabashedly pre-modern ways of the mountains. There is Orientalism at work here, sure, but also something else—an anxiety about progress, a suspicion that the Caucasian way of life, with its horses, mountains, and wine, is somehow more true to the human condition.

After Pushkin died, the poet Mikhail Lermontov wrote “Death of the Poet,” in 1837, resurrecting some of the themes that Pushkin trumpeted, provoking the ire of Nicholas I, who sent him away to military service the Caucasus. This again proved auspicious: three years later, Lermontov published his greatest work, “A Hero of Our Time,” and briefly enjoyed his literary celebrity. Like his hero Pushkin, he became entangled in a duel, and was killed, in 1841.

The tale of a romantic officer, “Hero” is at its best in describing the landscape of the Caucasus and the people who live there. (However, Lermontov also repeated stereotypes of Caucasians as violent, lascivious tricksters. As one character says, “What a people…. They can’t even say ‘bread’ in Russian, but they’ve learned how to say ‘Officer, tip for vodka!’ ”) The land is the real hero: beguiling, alien, always faintly exuding death.

Of nighttime passage through the mountains, Lermontov writes, “To the right and left of us were gloomy, mysterious chasms, into which the mists crept down, billowing and writhing like serpents…. All was quiet in the heavens and on the earth, as it is in the human heart at morning prayer.” Reading the book today, I am reminded, oddly enough, of “Apocalypse Now,” of journeys that are as perilous within as they are without.

The morning prayer is a reference to Islam, which makes its appearance in Caucasian narratives less as a cultural force than as a descriptive trope, local color to paint characters with. Tolstoy—who went to the Caucasus willingly in the eighteen-fifties, as a soldier with the Cossacks to tidy up the remains of a dissolute youth—wrote in his novel “Hadji Murat” that the titular character possessed an “oriental, Muslim dignity.” In tales like “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” he presents Muslim rites journalistically, as curiosities that are sure to pique the interest of readers in Moscow and Petersburg.

But for whatever simplicities he employed, Tolstoy understood the travails heaped upon the Chechens and their brethren better than the poets who came before him. In fact, as the New York Times noted, in 2009, he is probably the most revered Russian writer in Chechnya, where a museum (supported by Chechen authorities close to the Kremlin and thus eager to build the peace) to him stands. As a great-great-grandson of Tolstoy told the Times, “The Chechen people think that Tolstoy wrote most truthfully of the events that happened then and the character of the mountain peoples, their striving to be independent, for freedom, and their religious, ethnic and other particularities…Tolstoy, in spite of the fact that he was an aristocrat, a Russian count, was very democratic and open. He had friends among the Chechens.” Surely that arises in good part from Tolstoy’s ability to understand, and even sympathize with, Chechens’ animosity toward “those Russian dogs”—a sentiment that no amount of money can erase.

Ironically, it was when Russia was ruled by a Georgian—Stalin—that cruelty toward people of the Caucasus was most vehemently recrudescent. In 1944, he simply deported about a half a million of them eastward from land on which they had lived for centuries. The only reason this mass displacement is little remembered is because there were so many other atrocities taking place.

It is surprising, then, that one of the most sensitive portrayals of the region comes from that cruel age. “An Armenian Sketchbook” was published nearly a decade after Stalin’s death (and has recently been translated into English by the New York Review Classics), by Vasily Grossman, a writer who had suffered much during Stalin’s life, and was himself to shortly die from cancer. “Armenian Sketchbook” is a minor work—but that is only because Grossman’s major work, “Life and Fate,” is the twentieth-century equivalent of “War and Peace.”

Indeed, much like Tolstoy, Grossman understands the Caucasus as more than just the plaything of empires. Grossman cannot help but be astounded by the landscape, writing that “The whole of Armenia is awash with light.” And though the comity of the Soviet era was enforced by iron rule, he finds a hospitality that is absent in earlier narratives of the region: “What more do I need? On the street people greet me with a smile…. People share their stories with me; they tell me about their lives, about their sorrows…. It’s all right here. I’m accepted; I’m one of them.”

This kind of simplistic celebration of Armenians played unwittingly but conveniently into the Kremlin’s propagandistic purpose (even if Grossman was far from an establishment cheerleader himself). Maybe the saddest feature of all the literature about the Caucusus is that almost none of what is widely read and celebrated is written by Caucasians themselves.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union gave rise to the tumult that the Tsarnaev family apparently fled in hopes of a calmer life in the United States. The story of the Tsarnaev brothers—if they are indeed responsible for the bombing in Boston—spills well out of the boundaries of the Caucasian region. But it is tied to the stories of blood, lust, and tragedy that Russians have been writing about for centuries.

Alexander Nazaryan is on the editorial board of the New York Daily News, where he edits the Page Views book blog.

Photograph: Library of Congress

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